I went into the Apple store for the first time in months today–a day before Macworld–and came away disenchanted and disappointed. Even as Macworld is about to begin, I can’t imagine anything that his Steve-ness bring into this world that would rekindle my enthusiasm about the whole Apple platform. It’s a rather depressing feeling for someone who used to drink the koolaid.
At the store, I waited around a while to play with a Core 2 Duo iMac. As soon as I started to move the mouse around, it all came back to me. All the little annoyances and disappointments that, as a koolaid drinker, you try to just ignore or rationalize away. The first rude reminder was the weird mouse acceleration. With OSX’s default settings, the mouse just moves (or rather, accelerates) too slowly! argh. Fine, whatever, you can tweak that in System Preferences, but you never get exactly what you get with Windows (mainly because you can’t tweak sensitivity and acceleration separately; I always want very low acceleration and medium sensitivity).
I’ve lately been searching for a good RAW workflow in Windows (details coming in another post), and was eager to be re-inspired by Aperture’s completeness and simplicity. So I fire it up on the iMac, and start poking around. The first set of images loads, and I start scrolling through them. Then I see the familiar loading overlay message over the preview, with no visible progress. The Core 2 Duo is supposed to be way beyond the PPC G4 in terms of performance, and yet I’m still sitting here waiting for this image to load. There are tons of PC programs that can handle this without breaking a sweat.. grr.
I then try to switch to another album… beachball.
This is a brand new machine for [insert deity here]’s sake! What is the point of switching to a new architecture and raving about the “4x performance increase” if the user experience is exactly the same? They may have dramatically improved the hardware, in doing so, they’ve also illuminated serious software performance issues. It will likely take someone like Adobe to show everyone how it’s done.
I looked around the rest of the store, and couldn’t help but notice that everything just seemed like toys. Maybe it’s only because I’ve been using an X60 Thinkpad for a while. Apple laptops can look nice, but also very consumery. Even the MacBook Pro’s design looks somewhat dated. Silver is out. Meanwhile, the black Thinkpad look has been a classic since forever.
And then I was reminded that there’s non-obvious piece of wisdom that I only really learnt after using a Mac for a year. It’s this: if you’re Apple’s target user, then their stuff is great. If you deviate even a little bit from the predetermined user classes, then you’re screwed. You’re either a Pro with tons of cash, and everything you own has a “Pro” suffix on it, or you’re a total noob who doesn’t care about how iPhoto happens to arrange your photos on disk. Everyone caught in between just has to deal with random hacks, shareware apps that keep breaking because of OS upgrades, or would you prefer an OSX hint?
Apple’s free to take whatever approach that it chooses. But in the general scheme of things, it’s hard to see a closed platform that caters only to very specific users winning out in the end. If Apple decides to change course and open up their platform and make their software more flexible, they’ll suddenly collide into the same problems that Microsoft has been dealing with for years. There’s no indiciation that Apple would be any better at solving those problems, so maybe they are better off creating their niche products.